Everything I Found on the Beach (10 page)

The body was by his face now. “Christ,” Hold was thinking. “I guess here it is.” He could see the man heaped in the boat. The man wore all black, or so it looked in that light, with a big puffer jacket that gave him a comfortable, sleeping look. He shook him. He thought again about the rifle on the shore. He leaned as far as he could and punched the leg. Hold grabbed the collar and
pulled the man and sat him up and the head came up and sat itself up as if against a pillow and it was like the broken neck of a bird. He had the high cheekbones and wide face of a Slav.

The boat seemed to be suspended in that patch of water, and the two men were going up and down with the swell. Hold called at the man and then pulled his ear and just stood there holding the boat knowing the man was dead. He just tried to hold on, with the stinging water hitting him, and it was like his ability to make a decision was in the same suspended place as the boat.

What the hell had happened here? A scalloper? He knew that there were crew from all over, perhaps going between ships for something. The boat was bare and without markings. Had he run out of fuel? Hold stretched to the motor pump and squeezed the bulb and felt some resistance that meant there was a little fuel at least, and then saw the can and tried to reach it with an outstretched finger. It was full.

In the light from the headlamp the face looked very white and flat. “I have to get him ashore,” thought Hold. “I have to find something more from myself and get him ashore.”

He felt this sudden massive emptying tiredness as if this one thing was finally too much. Then it rang. He saw the glow first, a white shade. He half leapt at the man to reach him, draw him closer, and went for the pocket and the phone fell into the boat, flashing soundlessly, then
there were three pitching beeps and the battery went. “Shit,” said Hold, out loud. And then it all came to him, in the first relief of this first utterance and he swore and swore out loud and hit the side of the boat in his futility.

In his anger, the boat was starting to go out again and he couldn't hold it, but the anger itself came into him like this extra fuel.
I have to think quickly now. Think. Come on. It's happened now, you're in it. Do something, even if you can't hold the boat.

He braced himself against the rock and held the cord and unzipped the man's jacket and felt inside for wallet or card, the water starting to beat him again, for some sign of his name. And then he felt the water get a purchase and pull him off the rock and in his new found anger he got a strength in him and felt all the sick, balling fear in him alight and he yanked the boat and went into the water holding it, and up to his chest he spat his defiance at the sea as it came in through his gritted teeth and finding the ground under his feet he dragged the boat like some furious and stubborn horse and went toward the dark beach with everything he had, cursing and screaming.

When he got the boat nearly to the reef of sand it came finally with him in an angry run, knocking him to the stones as it beached itself. It had taken on water. On the beach the cold hit Hold. He tried to get his head round that and just held it like some solid fact to deal with later. “You have to get up,” he said. “Don't get cold. You have to get up.”

He shut the man's eyes and picked up the phone and tried to switch it on but it just flashed briefly, bleeped, and went out. Then he collapsed on the reef of sand.

The headlamp was dimming and going out. He switched it off for a while and just sat there looking at the shape of the boat and the dead man in the moonlight.

He got up and tried to walk a little of the stiff coldness out and went back to the boat. The grit and broken shells and sand that had been washed into his shoes grazed him, but it was pointless to try and do anything about that now. He knew he was hurt. It's amazing what you can't feel in the sea. The lume of the dawn was building and the bay was filled with this strange ancient light and he could hear turning in the energy of the tide.

He checked the man over again, went through the pockets, and lifted him to see if there were any other parts to his fairy tale in the boat, and then he took another look at the Slavic face. The wind was starting to lick up with the tide change and he bit with cold and was suddenly very hungry. He thought for a moment about taking the man's jacket that was drier than his. Somehow in his coldness and hunger was a sense of his own reality. He clung on to that.

Gulls were coming off the cliffs and circling and began to call and other birds were beckoning in the new light. He was shaking his hands to get them warm. “What if
someone was here to meet him,” Hold thought. Suddenly it was to him as if the light was some enemy, some thing that would see him. He thought back to the stones falling on the cliff earlier. “I cannot have been seen,” he said. “There was no one.” Then he saw the packages.

There were three of them, carefully wrapped, bound up in parcel tape, all about the size of a fist. He picked them up. Something inside him knew already they were packages of some dangerous, exploiting thing, which he felt a sick fear of in his gut. It was like they could speak.

He dragged the boat a little farther onto the reef and went back to the game bag and took out the knife. Then he cut a thin split in one of the parcels with the knowledge of what was in them already in him. A small, sticky spill of white powder sat up out of the split. It smelt strange on the knife. He had no idea what it was. But he knew it was drugs, and it looked raw and unprocessed and he wouldn't be able to tell you what part of his knowledge told him this.

He looked at the parcel in his hand and thought of the worth of it and of the house and of Danny and the dead Slav and of a risk that would surely only have been taken for great wealth.

“Now what?” he said. And then he sat on the rock with the parcels in his hand, the light coming.

He'd had this image of Cara with her neck in a net, tiring herself to a beaten point of exhaustion. Of his mother. Take it, he had thought. Take this now, and try
to change things, or you will have to stand by and watch it all again.

“I couldn't have been seen,” he thought. “No one could have seen this.”

PART TWO

He could not take everything. He had not intended to bring the net in and had no bag for it. There were the big fish and the rabbits. The rifle had to come. He was like a point of concentration now, with the mechanism from childhood fully kicked in.

As soon as he saw them, he knew he would take the packages. He had thought briefly about taking the boat, of checking the engine for serial numbers, of weighting the man and throwing him in the water and had known this was madness. He knew he must have no connection with the packages, and he must disappear off the beach.

He went back to the net and started to take the other fish out with his numb hands, trying to slow himself in this process, and the light was growing bit by bit, even giving some luminosity to the strands of nylon as if it was becoming animate. He got the knife and cut out the fish and dumped it on the rocks and cut out the other fish and there was something almost religious about cutting
the net, like he had broken some sanctity and that he had cut much more than the net in doing this thing. He went to the tangled crab and cut it free and cut and pulled away the threads amongst it and put it down on the rock so as not to hurt even this thing he had no like of. And he moved efficiently in this place of decision he had built for himself and pulled up the anchoring rope of the net from the bowl of rocks he had it in, ignoring the criminality of having cut the net.

He threw the fish down the beach and got the large plastic sack he carried for them and arm over arm piled the yards of net into it, tearing automatically at the large straps of seaweed that were amongst it. He thought about putting the net in the boat and of keeping the fish but he knew that should not be done; and he thought too about taking the fish and leaving the net lifted, and of bringing round the fishing boat and sculling out to collect it so much was his reluctance to leave the fish and to kill for no purpose. At least the gulls will have them, he thought. The bay was filling with light now and it was the point of most coldness.

He worked his hands trying to warm them and sucked at his fingers to bring the blood back to them and tasted the fish and salt water on them and the iodine tang of the weed. He put on the headlamp and took the rabbits from the bag and the nylon line and blunt needle for stitching the net and he cut out the liver and kidneys and hearts he had left in the rabbits and threw them too on
the beach and washed his hands in a pool and watched the dark strings of blood come off him. As cold as he was, the water felt warm on his hands.

He took the packages one by one and set them inside the rabbits and one by one stitched up the cavities, forcing the needle though the taut hide with a pebble and the rabbits grew in weight and seemed to reconstitute their missing shape like they underwent some backwards act of resurrection.

He had sat wondering what to do and everything had happened unconsciously, as if the decisions were being made at some distance from him, and he had none of the usual discussion in his mind about what choices to make. It was as if he already knew. He had sat and stared at the boat and at the heap of man and down at his fish and had taken out the fish scales and weighed the packages one by one, hanging them by their loops of tape. And he knew that for a man to take a boat, to take this weight of things somewhere, there had to be much value in those things and he had sat for a while with his head in his hands.

He looked once more at his scattered bounty of fish and took his knife and went to the boat and took the spare fuel and refilled the tank and pumped the fuel through to the motor. Then he dragged the man into the back of the boat. He took the bow of the boat by the cord and heaved it round until it met the water and walked in with it, feeling the cold water come into him
again and the man bounce in the bed of the boat and he let it ride over the waves and went with it into the deeper water.

He dropped the motor and pulled out the weed that had dragged in the propeller and took the gunwale cord and cut it with the knife, going backwards with the boat each time a wave came to it. Then he wrapped the cord over and over round the prop shaft and fed an end of it through the rings as if it might have snapped and gone itself around the engine. And as strongly as he could in the water he stayed the motor so it could not turn and pushed the boat back out into the deeper water.

He checked the prime on the motor once more and moved the choke and pressed the automatic starter and swore silently at the motor when it did not start. And then he cut off the toggle and took out the drawstring from the man's hood and unscrewed the cap of the flywheel as the boat kept going back at the beach and he kept walking it forward. He had cut his hand somehow and it was bleeding heavily onto the wheel and he wrapped the drawstring round the wheel and tugged and sent it round and the engine spat and fired and he leveled the choke and felt the blood go down his hand. And then he dropped a gear and coughed at the spume of fuel that caught him and he let the boat go.

It cut out through the water over the waves like some thing released and he watched it until it was way out in its straight line. Then he got out of the water, took his
things, and watched until he couldn't see the boat any more. Then he walked laden off the beach.

He dropped the net by the van.

He was shaking with exhaustion and cold and nervous and he could hardly move. His arms were numb with the effort of carrying the wet net.

He got the net in the back of the van and took out an old sack and spread it automatically on the driver's seat. The places his body hurt were becoming known to him one by one as the anesthetic effects of the adrenaline and the shock settled into a low, sick-tasting weight in his stomach.

“Don't do this,” he thought. “Take it to the police and turn it all in now.”

It was light now, and the blackbirds and thrushes were vibrant with sound. He sat there for a while. He thought of Danny and his belief in the outside chance.

“No,” he thought. “It's fallen to you. You kind of asked for something like this. You have to take it on now.”

He drove back to the trailer and took the rabbits in and put them on the unit in the bag. He took out the phone from the pocket in the bag and dried it and put it from some inexplicable paranoia inside the grill section of the cooker. Then he took out the rabbits from the bag and
looked at them and then he took them out and hung them in the van back thinking that would be natural, and that the van was most difficult to get into. “I cannot be too careful now,” he thought. “There is no part of me that can miss something.”

He was sure he was not seen but he understood what he had done and what he had started and how he had come into something very dangerous. He looked around the trailer. He locked the door and then he took the ball of string he'd hung the rabbits up with and he ran a line from the handle of the door to the open bathroom door and pushed the bathroom door back until the line was tight and then he wedged the bathroom door. He took the rifle from the case and checked it and laid it down on the unit by the bathroom door with its chamber open and he left the silencer off.
I cannot at any point let myself think that I am being too paranoid.
The extra sound of the unsilenced gun might give me split seconds if it happened. He looked around again and checked the line to see that it was tight enough to pull the bathroom door if the front door opened. He put a handful of cartridges on the shelf by the bathroom door, took the rifle, and went into the shower.

“This involves only me,” he had thought. “This will only affect me, and if I do it right it will solve everything.” He had sat on the rock, not really feeling the cold as if it was a thing far distant from himself, as if he had become his own voice of fate.

He knew. He simply knew he would take the parcels and that the boat had been delivered up to him and all that was left was to articulate this knowing in himself. Things come along and the rest of everything depends on what we can do with the things that come along, and we shouldn't make decisions out of fear.

He thought of the pointless death of the man and of the boat being delivered up to him on the beach and thought vaguely that the death would take on purpose if it was to secure things for Cara and Jake.

He knew what he should do. Secure the boat and call the police. But for what, then? Even as he had these arguments with himself he went through the things he needed to do and the way he would do them. The old mechanisms of surviving his father were already kicking in.

He looked down at the packages. He thought wildly about buying a boat, but first of the responsibility towards Cara and Jake. “Think of the solution this represents to them,” he thought. It was one big answer, if he could see it through. “It involves only me. There is a limit to how wrong it can go.”

He had to find strength to take his clothes off. They peeled off in drunk layers leaving his body stinging with the air on it.

Naked, he sat and rubbed off the sand and grit that had stuck in the congealing grazes at his ankles where the
tops of his shoes had been. His feet had swollen with the water and were raw and angry and blistered.

He washed off the dried blood from his hand in the sink and looked at the precise, deep scoring cut. He felt a deadweight in his arms, like a bruising, and knew this was just tiredness. He could see on his hip the love bite marks of the rock where he had smashed into it holding the boat and could feel the same dull, burning throb of pain in the shoulder that would come out as bruising in a few days; and then he stepped into the shower and just let all of those places hurt and sting as his body slowly came back to him.

He stayed in the shower until the tank ran out and then he took his towel and dried himself and went through to the bed and, exhausted, lay down.

When he woke up he was violently sick. He was woken by the screeching of magpies and the panicking clicking of the small birds as they raided their new nests. He had slept for barely an hour, and the sleep was something he could do nothing about.

When he had finished being sick he washed out his mouth and stood up. That was the last of it. “That's it, gone now,” he told himself. The bullets and the gun were still in the bathroom and he put them away methodically.

He took some painkillers and ate some plain ham from the fridge and made a coffee and sat down. The
trailer was like a goldfish bowl. “Everywhere's going to feel that way for a while,” he thought.

He finished the coffee and got some money and put the rifle in the van and drove out. He went to the garage and bought a cooler and some antiseptic cream and a multiple phone charger and filled up the van and asked to use the telephone directory. He said he had to find some numbers for a driving instructor for a friend and he pretended to find that and on his way wrote down the number that he wanted.

He drove out of the town to a phone booth that he knew and he called the number.

When he came out of the phone booth he sat in the car for a while and just looked out down the road and watched the clouds bunch up over the mountains inland. “Well, I'm in it now,” he said. Then he started the van up and took the back roads home.